130 - Why you NEED a side project!

Today I am going to talk about side project in web development.  Why you need one, how to stay productive and what projects to learn.  Why is it good to have a side project?      Learn new skills in your own time at your own pace      Learn new technologies and techniques     Work without any constraints.  If you don’t get it done then it doesn’t matter      They encourage creativity and thinking outside of the box      They help you keep focused on the main projects.      They can help with mental health by providing an escape from the ‘real’ work      They can be used as practice projects before working on production based code      Great for full stack devs how want to broaden their tool set      Great for getting out of comfort zone Five ways to stay productive  Create a things to do list.  I use GitHub projects  Create your own issues and PR’s with labels to help organise the different parts of the project  Time box the workload  If it starts to suck then stop.  Update the task list and move on - You are in control of the pressure.  So don’t worry if you don’t finish it.  Reduce the number of side projects you are working on at once.   Five side projects everyone can do  Learn how to automate backups with a cron job  Learn how to configure your dev machine via Ansible  Convert your blog into a web app/pwa/ native app  Start a podcast/YouTube channel that documents your learning journey  Rebuild your last project using a different programming language and document the comparisons